“A Burden for the Department”?: To The 1991 FRUS Statute

By Joshua BottsOffice of the Historian, U.S. Department of State

Released February 6, 2012

This post is adapted from a longer piece on the history of FRUS. See Joshua Botts, “FRUS at 150: The
Evolution of the Foreign Relations Series,” paper
presented at the 11th International Conference of Editors of Diplomatic
Documents, September 20, 2011. Available online (accessed February 2, 2011).

Between 1980 and 1991, the Foreign Relations of the United
States (FRUS) series entered a period of crisis.
In the early part of the decade, the academic community grew more concerned
about the increasing lag of FRUS publication from the
20-year line formally established for the series by President Richard Nixon in
1972.1Richard Nixon, memorandum attached to Executive Order
11652, March 8, 1972. See http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-11652.htm (accessed February
2, 2012). By the end of the decade, these anxieties were supplanted
by bitter criticism from academic, media, and Congressional sources of gaps in
FRUS coverage of pivotal Cold War covert actions. In
1991, Congress intervened to shape the future of the series that it had helped to create by
establishing a statutory mandate for both timeliness and comprehensiveness for
FRUS production. Throughout the entire period, the
Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation (also known as the
Historical Advisory Committee, or HAC) played a crucial
role in mediating (sometimes unsuccessfully) the tensions generated by clashing
demands for openness and for security.

By the late 1980s, however, Department officials had grown frustrated with the
HAC and its demands. The committee’s insistence on access to excised documents
sparked tensions with officials outside of the Historian’s Office. While HO and
its parent Bureau of Public Affairs argued that the HAC served an essential
function and that cooperation would improve the series and protect the
Department from damaging criticism, the Classification/Declassification Center
and the Bureau of Management characterized the committee’s support for openness
as an inherent conflict of interest. By 1988, hostility to the HAC led one
senior official to demand that PA do a better job of managing the committee and
to threaten to revoke its charter should it became “a burden for the
Department.”7Ronald Spiers memorandum to Charles Redman, November
10, 1988, P890058-1591, DoS P-Reels.

The Department’s obstinacy in the face of controversy encouraged Congress to
intervene. On October 19, 1990, Senator Claiborne Pell lamented that “questions
have been raised about the integrity of our own historical record at the very
time that in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere we are witnessing a
flood of disclosures and new documentation from governments long used to
concealing and falsifying the record.” After noting that, “the vigor that
democracy draws from the clean breeze of honest information,” Pell warned that
“this is no time for the United States to depart from the tradition of providing
an accurate and complete historical record of the actions taken by our
government in the field of foreign relations.”10Congressional Record – Senate, vol. 136, pt. 22, October 19, 1990,
p. 31389. Along with Senator Jesse Helms of the Foreign Relations
Committee and Senators David Boren and William Cohen of the Select Committee on
Intelligence, Pell secured Senate approval of a legislative mandate for FRUS requiring full access to historical documentation
for Department historians and the HAC and publication at a 30-year line.11Helen Dewar, “Senate Panel’s Quest: Filling Gaps in History of
Foreign Relations,” Washington Post, June 11, 1990,
p. A13.

2Department of State [PA/HO]
Staff Study on the Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Historical
Diplomatic Documentation in its Annual Report of December 21, 1983, October
1984 (with attached documents and analysis), Folder “June 1991 (84 Plan),”
Box 1, Lot File 09 D 473, Department of State, Washington, DC. Quote from
attached John Hughes memorandum to Secretary of State, January 30, 1984, p.
4. See also Ian Black, “Tightened Rules Keep Nation’s Secrets Too Long,
Historians Say,” Washington Post, September 10, 1983,
p. A3; Lorraine Lees and Sandra Treadway, “A Future for Our Diplomatic Past?
A Critical Appraisal of the Foreign Relations
Series,” Journal of American History (December 1983),
pp. 621-629; and William Slany, “Report by the Historian of the Department
of State,” July 1984, P840134-2027, Department of State Microfilmed Central
Files, Washington, DC (henceforth DoS P-Reels). Academic concerns about the
timeliness of FRUS publication was not exclusively
driven by interest in the volumes themselves. Until the passage of the 1991
law, declassification guidelines for the Department of State’s historical
records were devised in conjunction with the clearance of Foreign Relations compilations. In other words, when FRUS was delayed, researcher access to historical
Department records was also delayed.

3Ronald Reagan memorandum for Secretary of State, et al.,
November 12, 1985, P860009-1020, DoS P-Reels. See also Bernard Kalb
memorandum to Secretary of State, December 18, 1985, P860009-0998 and Ronald
Spiers cable to all diplomatic posts, February 25, 1986, 1986 State 057676
in Department of State Central Files (SAS), Washington, DC.

8Warren Cohen
letter to James Baker, February 15, 1990, P900159-0985, DoS P-Reels and
Warren Cohen, “Gaps in the Record: How State has allowed history to be
incomplete,” Foreign Service Journal (August 1990),
pp. 27-29.

12“A Plan to Improve
the Comprehensiveness and Accuracy of the Historical Foreign Affairs Record
Published in Foreign Relations of the United States,”
February 5, 1991 and William Slany memorandum for the record, February 5,
1991 in Folder “Program – A Plan – Feb. 91,” Box 1, Lot File 09 D 473,
Department of State, Washington, DC and Warren Kimball letter to James
Baker, January 14, 1992, P920042-0683 and Arnita Jones letter to James
Baker, April 12, 1990, P900159-0982 in DoS P-Reels; Congressional Record – Senate, vol. 136, pt. 22, October 19, 1990,
pp. 31391-31399, passim.; Page Putnam Miller, “The
Integrity of the U.S. Department of State’s Historical Series is at Stake,”
Government Publications Review (July-August
1991), pp. 317-323; Congressional Record – Senate,
vol. 137, pt. 14, July 29, 1991, pp. 20245-20248, passim.

1322 USC 4351,
et seq. See also Al Kamen, “Documents Law: 30
Years and Out,” Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.
A19 and Page Putnam Miller, “We Can’t Yet Read Our Own Mail: Access to the
Records of the Department of State,” in Athan Theoharis, ed., A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s
Right to Know (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998),
pp. 186-210, especially pp. 195-201. The law also had significant provisions
mandating the systematic declassification of Department of State records
after 30 years. Essentially, the law decoupled the declassification of
general Department of State records from the production of FRUS.

17See
Peter Hahn, “Glasnost in America: Foreign Relations of the
United States and the Middle East, 1955-1960,” Diplomatic History (October 1992), pp. 631-642 and Robert
Schulzinger, “Transparency, Secrecy, and Citizenship,” Diplomatic History (Spring 2001), pp. 165-178. For additional
assessments of the consequences of the 1991 statute (and the strengthening
of the HAC), see Betty Glad and Jonathan Smith, “The Role of the Historical
Advisory Committee, 1990-1994, in the Declassification of U.S. Foreign
policy Documents and Related Issues,” PS: Political
Science and Politics (June 1996), pp. 185-192 and Page Putnam
Miller, “We Can’t Yet Read Our Own Mail: Access to the Records of the
Department of State,” pp. 201-208.

18Documentation related to the HAC can be found in Department of State lot
files scheduled for permanent retention in the National Archives and Records
Administration. Pre-1991 HAC files are in 96 D 292. The post-1991 HAC files
are located in 99 D 041 (1991-1995 HAC meetings), 00 D 512 (1996-1997 HAC
meetings), 02 D 213 (1998-1999 HAC meetings), 03 D 130 (1992-1995 HAC
meetings), 04 D 446 (2000-2002 HAC meetings), 09 D 473 (1992-2007 HAC
meetings), and in current PA/HO office files. The lot files contain recorded
minutes of HAC meetings as well as a variety of briefing materials prepared
within PA/HO. Some HAC meeting minutes from the mid-1990s to the present are
also available online at http://history.state.gov/about/hac/meeting-notes and http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/ (both accessed August 1,
2011). The fas.org website, maintained by Steven Aftergood, also includes
links to the HAC’s annual reports since 1995.